As a conceptual framework http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine)
My impression was always the arguments were more like "Well yes, but we have this literal building full of technical manuals that describe every bolt and screw of your tank - and we can give you a copy of all of them for free! And think about it - after you have taken some modest effort to read and learn all of them by heart, you'll be able to fix and even modify your tank all on your own! No more dependence on crooked car dealers! And if you need help, we have monthly community meetups you can attend and talk with people just as tank-crazy as you are! (please only attend if you're sufficiently tank-crazy, and PLEASE only after you read the manuals)"
(This was decades ago, the situation has gotten significantly better today)
wget -O - https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt | nroff | less
This essay should be a mandatory reading for all CS students and anyone wanting to call himself hacker.
I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows? I know about the ad-thing where the cast of Friends or whatever bought windows 95, but as I recall even back then the OS just came with the device. The only exception was OSX, which was a “Big Deal,” even non-technical people downloaded it.
Anyway, it is funny to see this in retrospect. Nowadays, operating systems have become so commoditized that you can’t even make a business selling them.
I love Linux but his description is quite optimistic.
Not anymore. https://justine.lol/ape.html
In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 - Aug 2023 (2 comments)
In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 - Nov 2021 (4 comments)
In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 - Nov 2020 (64 comments)
In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 - Aug 2019 (50 comments)
In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 - April 2018 (13 comments)
In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 - Sept 2016 (54 comments)
In the beginning was the command line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 - March 2016 (1 comment)
In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 - Dec 2008 (12 comments)
In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 - Jan 2008 (5 comments)
In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 - Aug 2007 (2 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers. In the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a new discussion every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)
But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the
command-line interface to the GUI.
Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing
graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both
Microsoft and Disney?
But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like
intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we
are literate.
The structure of modern audiovisual media lends itself to the immediate application of implicit bias. On IRC, in the days of 56k before bandwidth and computer networks had developed to the point of being able to deliver low-latency, high definition audio and video, perhaps even for "real-time" videoconferencing, most of your interactions with others online was mediated through the written word. Nowhere here, unless some party chooses to disclose it, do race, gender, accent, physical appearance, or otherwise, enter into the picture and possibly cloud your judgment of who a person is - or, more importantly, the weight of their words, and whether or not they are correct, or at least insightful; consider Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper which first introduced what is now called the "Turing test," and how it was designed to be conducted purely over textual media as a written conversation, so as to avoid influencing through other channels the interrogator's judgment of who is the man, and who is the machine.
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this
global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV,
never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral
relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV
news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other
in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come
out into the world as one pretty feckless human being.
So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong
direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost
unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by
it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking
stands.
It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend
everything in detail.
Beyond the infectious slot machine-like dopamine gratification of the pull-to-refresh and the infinite doomscroll, the downvote has become a frighteningly effective means of squashing heterodoxy and dissent; it is only those messages that are approved of and given assent to by the masses that become visible on the medium. Those who take a principled stand are immediately squashed down by the downvote mob, or worse, suffer from severe censure and invective at the hands of those zealous enforcers of orthodoxy. The downvote mechanism is reminiscent of the three "filters" Chomsky wrote of when he was discussing the mass media in "Manufacturing Consent," and the way advertisers, government, and capital all control and filter what content is disseminated to media consumers.
The message of modern, audiovisual, short-form, upvote-driven social media is bias and group compliance bereft of nuance. If you want to produce and consume novel ideas you are better served by media based on the written word.
Whenever I see new coders struggle, it usually is because they:
- Don't know the context of what they are executing
- Don't know about the concept of input and output
Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see. Using pipes to redirect it comes naturally.
Not being natively connected to context, input and output is often at the core of problems I see even senior programmers struggle with.
That complicated series of commands you just ran? Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.
Yet events are the primary way anything happens on a computer, whether it’s a user system or a server.
Me: navigate to linked website, see wall of text.
Me: clicks reading mode
Me: *193 - 245 minutes*
Me: bookmark to read later; probably not
The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.